Our “embodiment” is one pillar of the enactive approach. Today we will learn what the notion of “embodiment” is about, what is stands for and its importance in common life and in trauma and dissociation. We will become acquainted with the idea that how we feel, perceive, imagine, think, speak and act is strongly influenced by our existence as physical and lived bodies.

In trauma, there tends to be a trinity of tendencies to act: to feel fragile and to defend, to avoid feeling and realizing what happened, and to seek means of control to counter one’s fragility and motivated ignorance. Today’s workshops discuss this trinity while focusing on its embodied manifestations. The goal is to inspire clinicians how to include our principled embodiment in trauma therapy.

“Embedment” is another cornerstone of the enactive approach. Today we learn that we do not exist as brains/minds/bodies in a void. Rather, we ongoingly couple ourselves to an environment that affects us and that we affect. This environment is not part of an objectively existing reality. It is a world we enact and couple to our self that we also enact. As we do this, we do not find but make meaning.

In complex trauma, there tend to be three or more kinds of dissociative agents. Each enacts and reenacts his or her own experiences and ideas of self, world, and self-world couplings. Each makes meaning. Effective clinicians couple themselves to their patients as a whole and the dissociative agents they may include. To do this, they live a deep affective interest in what it is like to exist as a traumatized individual or dissociative agent of a particular kind. Today’s workshops focus on this phenomenology.

The more experiences and facts are painful, the harder it is to integrate and realise them. Relative to limited power of action, individuals are inclined to avoid or ignore experiencing, knowing, and realising horrors. This avoidance may include efforts to disown their body. However, doing so implies a loss of self and meaning. How to raise the power to integrate and realise?

Clinicians, scientists, civilians, yes, even whole societies may also long and strive to ignore the dread they cannot bear. The price of ignorance is high. How to raise anyone’s power to integrate and realise?

We would better not ignore either that neuroscience depends on longing, conscious scientists and conscious participants in research. The brain merely shows physical features, neither experience nor meaning. In an enactive perspective, neuroscience then, takes a particular methodology. What is this neurophenomenology about?